Abstract. Ethnocentrism denotes behaviour and beliefs that are positive towards
those who share the same ethnicity and negative towards others. Recent
artificial society models have been interpreted as demonstrating how
ethnocentrism might evolve under minimal assumptions. In these,
evolution is modelled over generations of agents where new agents are
born inheriting the ethnicity, behaviours and location of their parents.
Behaviour does not change within generations but over many generations
and agents only interact with their neighbours. We present a model that
considers short-term cultural adaption, where agents may interact with
any in a population and do not die or give birth but imitate and
innovate their behaviours. While agents have a fixed ethnicity, they
have the ability to form and join cultural groups and to change how they
define their in-group based on both ethnic and cultural markers (or
tags). We find that over a range of parameters cultural identity, rather
than ethnocentrism, becomes the dominant way that agents identify their
in-group producing high levels of positive interaction both within and
between ethnicities. However, in some circumstances, cultural markers
of group preference are supplemented by ethnic markers. In other words,
whilst pure ethnocentrism (based only on ethnic identity only) is not
sustained, groups that discriminate in terms of a combination of
cultural and ethnic identities do occur. In these less common cases,
high levels of ethnocentric behaviours evolve and persist – even though
the ethnic markers are arbitrary and fixed – but they only emerge when
combined with culture centric behaviour. Furthermore, cooperative
ethnocentric groups do not emerge in the absence of cultural processes.
The latter suggests the hypothesis that observed ethnocentrism in
observed societies need not be the result of long-term historical
processes based upon ethnic markers but could be more dependent upon
short run cultural ones. We discuss these results as well as the dangers
of over interpretation of models like this.